1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mechanism to reduce a load on a computer and efficiently to manage printing jobs or printing devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
A distributed printing technique to realize high-speed printing by distributing printing jobs on a network and using a plurality of printer is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-290623. The document discloses that a job issuer such as a personal computer collects the states of the printing jobs distributed to the plurality of printer and the personal computer manages the states of the printing jobs in parallel.
However, for example, a large quantity of printing jobs may be populated for printing to a large number of printing devices on various places connected to a network throughout the country. In order to monitor hundreds of such printing devices, for example, not several printing devices, the monitoring method disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2001-290623 is not realistic. Monitoring of hundreds of printing devices in parallel makes a processing load very heavy. Or, the monitoring extremely increases the cost of a monitoring computer.